THE CANCER GENOME AND ITS USES

In her mobile home, North Lake Samish. 

Waiting for Prince Charming
I doubt if she had me in  mind

The dust from my Cinco de Mayo Cumpleanos Ochenta Celebration finally has settled.  There were about 30 people here, and all seemed to enjoy themselves.  My granddaughters did much of the shopping.  Unfortunately it appears that they are used to feeding marathon runners and weight lifters in their twenties, not a bunch of sedentary city folk  with a median age of about 60.  Thus, you can easily imagine the state of my refrigerator.  Anybody want two quartz of guacamole?  How about four dozen corn tortillas?  IF I can thrive on ground meat, cheese and tequila I will have no need for grocery stores until mid-August, at the earliest.   And by then I may be in Iceland, where I will subsist on shark-fin soup and braised seaweed.  How much weight will I lose, you ask?  Not enough.

So, anyway, I want to report on some new cancer research.  The sharp eyes of Dick Ingwall detected the following and dispatched it to me

http://nyti.ms/ZVI8Zn

From this link you can follow further links to an abundance of information.  I did, and some of it I think I understood.

The topic of this article is how best to classify cancers.  Traditionally they have been subdivided based on the tissue or organ they affect:  ovarian, breast, lung, etc.  Within this broad category tumors are further differentiated by pathologists, who examine slices of tissue under a microscope.  The correct categorization of a tumor can be critical; some therapies work well on some kinds of cancers but not at all on other types.  Mistakes seem to be made rather frequently.  Fortunately, a new and more reliable  (but, I would wager, much more expensive) diagnostic technique involves the determination of precisely which  genes in the tumor are mutated, and how.  This is done using the findings of the  TCGA, which codes for The Cancer Genome Atlas.  TGCA comprises a massive, multi-institutional effort funded by the NIH (yes, that very NIH, the one that our leaders in Washington just hobbled with a substantial  budget cut*.)  The authors involved in these studies seem confident that basing treatment on similarities in cancer genomes is the way to go.  For instance, some kinds of ovarian, breast, colon and lung cancers share similar DNA defects.  Thus, research on breast cancer may reflect on ovarian, and vice versa.     Through my ongoing efforts to wrap my mind around epigenetics I know that genes are not the whole story, but they are a big pary of it.  Thus, I am mildly stoked.  But...

So, okay, this isn’t a cure, I acknowledge.  Incremental progress is fundamentally dissatisfying.    We all want some towering genius to announce: “Oh, cancer?   Why, we can get rid of it THIS way.  Now lets' go onto something more interesting.”   Sorry, ain’t  gonna happen.    We need to keep pecking away .  The ultimate payoff will be well worth the frustration.

*You didn't  complain?  Tut, tut